


A Gloriously Disturbing Intimacy

by telling_you_stories



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, First Kiss, Gideon makes terrible puns, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Writing my own ending while waiting for Alecto
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:35:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27024403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telling_you_stories/pseuds/telling_you_stories
Summary: It was just cavalier and necromancer -- two perfect Lyctors -- in a room that smelled like rust and dirty socks.Alone.Which meant, Gideon knew, Harrowhark was finally free to do whatever she wanted. What she had been dying to do ever since she’d seen Gideon alive and back in her own body.And what Harrowhark Nonagesimus wanted, more than anything else in the universe, was, of course, to yell at Gideon Nav.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 16
Kudos: 245





	A Gloriously Disturbing Intimacy

**Author's Note:**

> I have many, many thoughts and theories about what's going to happen in Alecto, but obviously I'm going to write about the most important one: Gideon and Harrow both live and get to make out.

They were finally alone, in a spartan, unremarkable bunkroom in the BOE base. Away from the invasive inquisitiveness of Ianthe and the shrewd-yet-friendly curiosity of Camilla and the -- well, everyone was being nosy as fuck, honestly.

But they were gone and it was just cavalier and necromancer -- two perfect Lyctors -- in a room that smelled like rust and dirty socks.

Alone.

Which meant, Gideon knew, Harrowhark was finally free to do whatever she wanted. What she had been dying to do ever since she'd seen Gideon alive and back in her own body.

And what Harrowhark Nonagesimus wanted, more than anything else in the universe, was, of course, to yell at Gideon Nav.

Her hands were wrapped in the front of Gideon's shirt and she was shaking her.

"You _died!_ " she accused.

"Not really. I mean, I did, but it wasn't permanent," said Gideon, reasonably. _Extremely_ reasonably, considering the circumstances, which were that she was being shaken by her necromancer like a dusty robe taken from storage, when, if anything, it was Harrow who'd had to go and make things so complicated, and, arguably, Gideon who'd been the one who fixed it.

God, it felt good to have Harrow yelling at her again.

"You didn't know you'd come back. You _left_ me." Harrowhark scowled at her.

Harrowhark's familiar expression was made unfamiliar by her eyes. Gideon's eyes, or what had been her eyes, golden orbs set in Harrow's pinched, ferrety face. They were exceedingly sexy eyes, and they were used to looking at hot girls and things Gideon was about to whack with her sword. Now Harrow was going to use them to read tedious books and examine skeletons and to glower at people.

Gideon had never felt sorry for her eyes before, but the day seemed to be full of firsts.

"You're the one who left me," Gideon said, still mostly reasonable, but starting to get angry. "Cut open your own skull to make sure you didn't even remember me. Had to try to control everything. If you'd just eaten me like you were supposed to, you would've known I was inside of you this whole time."

She was about to continue when Harrowhark shook her again. "You died and you left me, alone, to spend an eternity without you, with the power to do almost anything in the universe but bring you back." Her voice broke on the last "you," and Gideon realized with horror that she was crying, leaking fluid out of Gideon's tear ducts to leave inky grey trails through her face paint.

"But you did have the power to bring me back," said Gideon. Then she thought about it from another angle, and reconsidered. "Or, you had the power to make sure I didn't get eaten, and I had the power to bring me back? Or… was it God's power, and Alecto had it?" She shrugged and gave up trying to work it out. The point was, she was back, obviously, and had a body for Harrow to shake and yell at. Her scowling face and contemptuous voice were comfortingly familiar, and Gideon was barely embarrassed at how much she'd missed her sullen batwing of a necromancer. "Good thing Camilla rescued my body, though. Would've been shit to come back and find my biceps had all rotted away or something."

"Gideon --" Harrow interrupted herself with a sob. She gritted her teeth, took a deep breath, started again. "Gideon Nav, you are an idiot, an infuriating asshole, and an incompetent moron. You've made my life more complicated from before I was even born. I fucking hate every atom of your being."

Gideon grinned foolishly. "Yeah, I know. And?" A dirty smear of paint and tears made twin rivers down Harrowhark's cheeks, leaving chalky droplets on the front of her shirt.

Gideon watched as her eyes -- Gideon's eyes, in Harrow's face -- looked into her eyes -- Harrow's eyes, in Gideon's face. The dark eyes were significantly less sexy, and didn't suit her red hair at all. One more thing about not being dead she was going to have to learn to live with.

And Harrow wasn't dead, either. She was back in her body, with all her Lyctor powers, and the two of them apparently had an immortal eternity together. It was awful, obviously. It probably would've been better to just die, eaten by one of those ugly wasp-things or drowned in the river of bloody ghosts or just stabbed through by some wimpy rapier, instead of being stuck with Harrowhark Nonagesimus until, probably, the heat death of the universe.

Gideon was grinning so wide her face began to hurt. Harrow reached up and rested the fingertips of one hand on Gideon's zygomatic bone, and Gideon started at the icy touch.

Harrow swallowed and looked away, absorbed in something past Gideon's right shoulder. "You're a brazen imbecile that ruined my life. And I never want you to leave me like that again."

And then Harrowhark leaned up and kissed her.

Gideon froze, because what the _fuck_.

Harrow's lips were cold and rough, and they touched Gideon's very softly, and after a moment Harrow released Gideon's shirt and stepped back. And that was how Gideon discovered that her legs had turned to useless mush, and she took a few steps backwards until the edge of the bed hit the backs of her knees and she sat down hard.

Harrow -- Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Heir to the House of the Ninth, Reverend Daughter of Drearburh, the Ninth Saint to Serve the Emperor, the Fists and Gestures of the Prince Undying -- had just _kissed_ her.

On the _lips._

"Harrow," said Gideon carefully. Her brain was a block of ice, which was deeply inconvenient timing given her desperate need to understand what the fucking hell was happening. "You just kissed me. On the _lips._ "

Harrowhark stood very still in the center of the small room. Her hands were balled into fists at her sides, and her face was stone under its smeared paint. She said, flatly, "Yes."

Gideon's body was making a lot of very loud feelings. Her heart was pounding, her face was hot all the way back to her ears, and there was a strange churning in her torso that made her want to throw up, or laugh, or possibly both.

Her brain, on the other hand, was still uselessly blaring white static, and it took an inordinate amount of effort to dredge up her next word.

Eventually, though, it turned up, blurry and confused.

"Why?"

Harrow sniffed derisively. "Griddle," she said piteously, "you should attempt, sometime, to pay attention to the things I tell you."

"Oh," said Gideon.

The silence stretched out between them.

Finally Gideon licked her lips and said, "Harrow?"

"Yes?" The word was sharp and hostile as a rapier.

The churning in Gideon's stomach had turned into a roar that filled her ears. She leaned over until she could reach the edge of Harrowhark's robe and pull on it, and said, barely audible over the clamor inside her head:

"Do it again?"

Harrow took a sharp, quick breath. She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them to look at Gideon, and said softly, "All right."

She took a step and stood before Gideon. Their relative positions put her face just above Gideon's eye level. Gideon put her hand out to touch the side of Harrow's face, which was an embarrassing thing to do, and saw both her hand and Harrow were trembling, which was even more embarrassing, but nothing was more embarrassing than what she did next, which was to say, "Okay," in a shaky voice as Harrow leaned in to kiss her again.

Harrow tasted like facepaint. She made a terrifyingly unguarded noise in the back of her throat when her lips touched Gideon's again, and her bone earrings were cool on Gideon's fingers where she had Harrow's face cradled in her hands.

Gideon had spent her formative years attempting to destroy Harrowhark with her bare hands. She had let Harrow drain her life force like a human battery. She'd died for Harrow, given up her soul to save Harrow's life and power her Lyctorhood, come back to inhabit Harrow's empty body and fought Heralds with Harrow's weak noodle arms and shoved Harrow's intestines back inside her torso.

In short, she and Nonagesimus's body had a long list of disturbingly intimate encounters. And if you'd asked her five minutes ago which was the most intimate, Gideon would've said the intestine thing.

But this -- her mouth on Harrowhark's, their spit mixing together, Harrow's tongue softly tracing the inside of Gideon's top lip -- was infinitely, terrifyingly, gloriously worse.

Then Gideon moved her mouth to kiss the soft skin of Harrow's neck, and Harrow let out a soft gasp, and that was even worse.

And then Harrow moved her hand under Gideon's shirt to run her fingers along her stomach muscles, and Gideon moaned a little, and that was _much_ worse.

And after that Gideon stopped listing things, because it was clear that everything was going downhill from here, and it was also clear that under no circumstances was Gideon going to want to stop.

Even more horrifying, Harrowhark didn't seem to want to stop, either. In fact, she'd climbed onto Gideon's lap -- a move that, if Gideon had still been keeping track, would've earned a special commendation for unsettling intimacy -- and was running her hands across Gideon's torso as though she were checking that her cavalier's vertebrochondral ribs were all present and accounted for.

Which might be exactly what she was doing, realized Gideon, with the three remaining brain cells that were not preoccupied with either how weird this situation was or how fucking good it felt.

She pulled back and rested her forehead on Harrow's. "Nonagesimus," she started, then stopped.

She was panting like she was at the end of a ruthless training session with Aiglamene. It would've been super awkward if she hadn't moved to a place beyond awkwardness, and also if Harrowhark hadn't been breathing just as hard. Her pupils were blown wide, black voids that contrasted dramatically with the light irises that had, until recently, been Gideon's.

Her cold hands were curved around Gideon's sides. She moved her thumbs lightly against her hot skin, then stilled.

"Nav?" she said.

Gideon's mind had been focused intently on the motion of Harrow's fingers, and on measuring the short distance between where Harrowhark touched her skin and other places where she was not. The few scraps of attention she had left had been considering, with a disconcerting eagerness, where _she_ was touching _Harrow,_ but Gideon reluctantly dragged them back to the matter at hand.

What _was_ the matter at hand?

Oh. Right.

Gideon poked Harrow in the cheek. "I know the skull paint is like, your religion and also the armor that protects you against the mortifying ordeal of being known. But I was hoping you could, just this once, for me, not be a _huge fucking weirdo_ and take it off so we can keep kissing without me having to eat paint."

Harrow blinked at her, then sat back and put her hands to her painted face -- Gideon immediately mourned the loss of her touch -- and pulled it off like a mask, leaving bare skin behind.

"What the fuck?!" Gideon leaned back.

Harrowhark dropped her face -- her _face_ \-- off the side of the bed. It promptly disintegrated into nothingness, and Gideon tried, unsuccessfully, not to wonder if that meant she was going to be breathing in Harrow-skin-and-paint for the next several hours.

"It's just the first dermal layer," said Harrow, shrugging. "It was easiest." She frowned and touched the side of Gideon's mouth. "But there's paint all over you already. I can --"

"Ick. Yuck. Nope. Not a chance," interrupted Gideon. She leaned back a little, and shoved at Harrowhark's hips until she got the hint and stood up. "I am going to go to the bathroom and _wash_ the paint off my face, like a normal human being and not an _incredibly_ creepy person who thinks it's easiest to just _take off my face_ instead of lather up some fucking soap."

She stood up and walked to the bathroom, then turned back to look at Harrowhark. The necromancer was sitting stiffly on the edge of the bed, fully clothed but barefaced, and thus, as far as Gideon was concerned, unsettlingly naked.

"Harrow?"

Harrowhark looked at her, and her solemn expression darkened into the start of a scowl.

"I love you too, all right?"

Her necromancer's face shifted into a shape she'd rarely seen. It was bright and uncomplicated and tugged up the corners of her mouth and creased the edges of her eyes and softened the permanent furrow between her eyebrows and made her -- beautiful.

But all she said was, "Go wash your face, Griddle."

Gideon flashed her a smile and ducked into the bathroom to examine her face in the mirror.

It was an unsettling sight. Besides Harrow's dark eyes staring back at her -- super weird, still -- white and black paint had smeared into a gray mess all around her mouth. It looked like she'd been making out with a nun.

When she'd gotten the paint off her skin and was working on scrubbing it off her teeth, it occurred to her that she _had_ been making out with a nun.

"Gross," she told her reflection. "You are making ghastly, questionable disgusting choices, Gideon Nav."

Despite this sage advice, her reflection just beamed at her. Gideon shrugged, smoothed her hair back, and then flexed a few times in the mirror before walking back out to her necromancer.

***

A long silence.

"Gideon?"

"Hm?"

"I don't -- I haven't… I've never done this before."

A snort. "Me either. I mean, I'm pretty sure I'd remember if we had."

"That's not -- I mean, I haven't -- not just you, but not with -- not with anyone."

"And who do you think _I've_ done this with? The creaking old nuns? Camilla? Coronabeth?! ...Actually, you know what, if you want to think I tried this with Corona first, go right ahead and -- ow, stop! That hurts!"

"Griddle, I'm serious!"

"So am I! New rule: no skeletons in bed! Snogging with Gideon Nav is a skeleton-free zone."

"Nav."

"Fine. For you, oh caliginous princess, skeletons are negotiable. We can negotiate skeletons. Should've known the Reverend Daughter would have a boner for bones --"

" _Gideon_."

A rustle of sheets and the soft rasp of a calloused hand brushing across short hair. Then, quieter, "Harrow. I know. I -- I don't know any more about this than you do. Any of it."

"I understand you may not have any hands-on experience -- stop sniggering, Griddle -- you may not have done this before either, but you've read… you have all those magazines --"

" _Magazines_? First swordplay, now this -- do necromancers think you can learn everything just by reading? What's next, you're going to try to learn how to cook out of a book?"

"As a matter of fact --"

"Okay, but look how that went. Proves my point."

"Griddle, if you're going to be like this --"

"Alright, okay, look, I'm sorry. I'm being serious. We're in this together, right? We'll figure it out. One flesh, one end, and all that, right?"

"...all right."

A breath. Then,

"Did you ever think about how that kind of sounds like a sex toy thing? 'One flesh, one end' -- like the instructions for a really _big_ \-- wait, Nonagesimus, I promise I'll stop --"

Then muffled laughter, then quiet -- almost.


End file.
